Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption

By Robert Latham

From the novels of Anne Rice to The Lost Boys, from The Terminator to cyberpunk science fiction, vampires and cyborgs have become strikingly visible figures within American popular culture, especially youth culture. In Consuming Youth, Rob Latham explains why, showing how fiction, film, and other media deploy these ambiguous monsters to embody and work through the implications of a capitalist system in which youth both consume and are consumed.

Inspired by Marx's use of the cyborg vampire as a metaphor for the objectification of physical labor in the factory, Latham shows how contemporary images of vampires and cyborgs illuminate the contradictory processes of empowerment and exploitation that characterize the youth-consumer system. While the vampire is a voracious consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its own flesh. Powerful fusions of technology and desire, these paired images symbolize the forms of labor and leisure that American society has staked out for contemporary youth.

A startling look at youth in our time, Consuming Youth will interest anyone concerned with film, television, and popular culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2007
• ISBN: 9780226467023

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Reviews for Consuming Youth

[darthdeverell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

In Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs, and the Culture of Consumption, Rob Latham argues of vampires and cyborgs, “These figures metaphorically embody the libidinal-political dynamics of the consumerist ethos to which young people have been systematically habituated during the contemporary period. The vampire is literally an insatiable consumer driven by a hunger for perpetual youth, while the cyborg has incorporated the machineries of consumption into its juvenescent flesh” (pg. 1). He continues, “The vampire and the cyborg thus provide fruitful models for apprehending the forms of cultural activity – of labor and of leisure – that contemporary capitalist society has staked out for American youth, offering a potent meditation on the promises and perils inherent in youth consumption” (pg. 1). To this end, Latham writes, “Contemporary American youth culture can profitably be studied in terms of a dialectic of exploitation and empowerment rooted in youth’s practices of consumption, practices that are enabled by and contained within specific technologies, primarily electronic ones (videogames, television, music videos, computers, etc.)” (pg. 4). His work is primarily Marxist, though he does draw upon Donna Haraway’s cyborg theory.Discussing the link between vampires and capitalism, Latham writes, “In brief, the capitalist-vampire made willing accomplices of its laborer-victims by soliciting their desire with seductive promises – for example, perpetual youth – and profitably attaching that desire to an ever-expanding realm of commodities, thus installing a capitalist logic of accumulation within working-class hearts and households” (pg. 28). Looking at the work of Joshua Meyerowitz, Latham writes, “In essence, these various critiques implicitly deployed my three readings of consuming youth: the concept of premature sophistication registered an awareness of the growing social presence of young consumers determinedly pursuing their own pleasures, while that of incipient juvenilization acknowledged the powerful influence of youthful imagery and values on adult desires and decisions. The third meaning of consuming youth is crystallized in the Calvin Center study, where the result of the collapsing of the adult-child polarity is depicted as a generalized ‘youthification,’ a ‘state of arrested development’ that ‘encourages everyone, including adults and young children, to think and act like adolescents’” (pg. 46-47). Latham continues, “If youth represented a profound contradiction for Fordist culture, it was even more of a contradictory formation in the post-Fordist context, since the economic conditions for its popular construction in terms of consumer hedonism had begun to crumble” (pg. 70). Further, “The contemporary crisis of capital becomes also a libidinal crisis, the failure of youth to achieve sexual adulthood in their collective enthrallment to a perversely morbid form of consumption” (pg. 74).Discussing gender and the yuppie era, Latham writes, “What mediates between these class and gender positionings is the category of youth: for the yuppie vampire conceived both as a member of the new bourgeoisie and as a polymorphously perverse androgyne, youth is the imaginary promise of consumption, its utopian subject (since the one who consumes is youthful) and also its utopian object (since youth is what is consumed)” (pg. 99). He continues, “If the youth-consumer vampire emerges at the seductive interface linking youth with the video apparatus, then the cyborg closes the circuit, effacing the seams between youthful bodies and technological systems via their mutual incorporation into a new mutant identity” (pg. 138-139). Of narratives about the tech industry, Latham writes, “The 1990s narratives I consider here depict a highway topography whose horizons extend not into the thrilling vistas of an inexhaustible frontier but into the sleazy dreamscapes of a kitschy, commercialized hyperreality. Yet at the same time that these novels and films offer a scathing GenX critique of youth’s prospects in an information culture – implicitly indicting the I-Way’s rampant commodification of the ventersome spirit traditionally associated with road-bound travel – their reactivation of the libidinal dynamics of classic road texts revives, if in an ironic register, a utopian longing for some realm of febrile possibility escaping the cool, calculated artifice of electronic simulation” (pg. 197). Of hacking culture, Latham writes, “During the past decade, popular coverage of hackers has revived historical critiques of postwar youth subcultures as morally decadent, inadequately socialized, disrespectful of bourgeois institutions (such as private property), and wantonly destructive” (pg. 219).